Somaforming on an alien Earth

Abstract

The realities of climate catastrophe increasingly threaten opportunities for multispecies liveability on this planet; Earth is becoming more alien every day through unequal intensities of weirding. We explore the conceptual provocations in the idea of ‘terraforming Terra’: that is, exploring the politics of transforming exoplanets – fabulated in the pages of science fiction – in contemporary empirical situations on an alien Earth. Gleaning insight from the speculative fiction of Becky Chambers in her 2019 novella To Be Taught, If Fortunate, we examine her concept of ‘somaforming’ in relation to terraforming. Chambers presents somaforming as a technology deployed to adapt bodies to alien planets, as an explicit alternative to terraforming, enabling human survival in hostile exoplanetary environments. We read somaforming with empirical reference to ongoing technoscientific efforts seeking to adapt bovine bodies to the imagined futures caused by global warming, in preparation for weird worlds to come. We analyse two scientific experiments that attempt to adapt cattle to the negative environmental impacts of climate change – respectively parasitism and heat stress – affecting animal welfare and agricultural productivity. While these somaforming practices each use a different technology transforming the cows’ body – through paint or gene editing – we argue that both illustrate the dangers of allowing ‘somaforming experiments’ to pre-empt an alien Earth, in its foreclosing of alternatives to ‘business as usual’.